Ensode Technology, LLC

Being a child of the 80's, I love listening to music I grew up with. Unfortunately, it seems most of the 80's compilation CDs out there made a conscious effort to find the suckiest songs of the 80's and put them together in a CD. It seemed like the really good music from that era had just but disappeared.

Today while browsing Amazon I ran into some MP3 downloads for some songs I hadn't heard in about 20 years, the good stuff that I thought had dissappeared, I, of course, became very eager to add these songs to my collection.

When downloading individual songs in Amazon, no special software is needed, however, the Amazon MP3 downloader is needed to download complete albums.

They have a few Linux versions for Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. The only version of Ubuntu they support is Gutsy Gibbon, which is two versions behind the latest, Intrepid Ibex.

Feeling brave, I tried to install the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Amazon MP3 Downloader under Intrepid Ibex, unfortunately the installer failed, telling me that the architecture was wrong. The deb package available on Amazon is for i386, and I run the 64 bit version of Ubuntu Linux.

I googled around to see if there was a way to install 32 bit packages under 64 bit Ubuntu, I ran into getlibs.

getlibs is a script that downloads any missing libraries for any installed package.

Once getlibs is installed, the Amazon MP3 Downloader needs to be installed, passing a parameter to ignore the architecture difference:

sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture amazonmp3.deb

This will install the package, it will be placed under /usr/bin/amazonmp3, however at this time it won't run properly because of missing libraries. In order to get the libraries, we need to run the getlibs script:

sudo getlibs /usr/bin/amazonmp3

At this point the application should be "good to go" and able to download MP3 albums from Amazon MP3 Downloads.

Thanks David for your write-up. I ran into the same problem and reached the same conclusion with getlibs. I contacted Amazon's support and asked them to consider providing 64-bit packages in the future and gave them a link to this page to help them understand the problem.
I'd recommend to anyone having this issue to contact Amazon with their 'Contact Us' link and specifying it's an Amazon Downloader Application issue asking for 64-bit support. I can't imagine it's all that hard to do since the work-around isn't difficult, just annoying.

At the time I wrote this entry, there was no Amazon MP3 Downloader for Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex. Amazon has now provided one. One of these days I may update the entry. The information is still valid though.